Word: plot
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...hunter is keener than a best-selling novelist on the prowl for a bankable plot. So when Jacqueline Susann said that she had always wanted to write about "women in their prime who lose their husbands by death or divorce," the results were predictable. The current Ladies' Home Journal contains a 15,000-word novelette (Dolores) that reads -well, like art imitating life. Pantherlike Dolores Cortez is widowed when her handsome Irish American husband, U.S. President Jimmy Ryan, is struck down in mid-term by a heart attack. Struggling to make ends meet on $30,000 a year...
That's the big problem: that the film finally has too little faith in its own second sight and comes up with a real, plot-line explanation that is not spiritual but superstitious. That's really the fault of the Daphne du Maurier story from which the film is taken, but it's all the more disturbing because it reminds us how big the gap is between the best film technique and the best film content, a desert where the best technical directors--Bertolucci or Stanley Kubrick--have often gotten caught with nothing to say, needing direction themselves. I just...
...detail of the importers' operation, you see, involved a telephone call to a hotel in a famous south Florida resort on the same day the president of the United States was scheduled to visit. The codeword for the payload was "corpse," and so an alert operator smelled a plot with a higher and more violent purpose and had the call traced. By the time the smugglers' plane was in the air, it was already photographed and under constant radar and photographic surveillance. Which just goes to show James's ingenuity and initiative in getting off the hook. Still, the life...
...novel, but that only makes you more wary. And the further you read into the book the more anxious you get. You keep telling yourself there has got to be a catch somewhere. Don't let your guard down--it could come any page now--a sudden reversal. The plot isn't supposed to be so straightforward. Surely one of the characters will go mad--this world is just too sane. When is the author going to show his face in a slick self-consciousness of narrative? Where is the burlesque? Be ready now. But when it's all over...
Myth in the modern novel is reworked into absurd comedy, and plot retreats upon itself. Characters are puppets whose strings lead you to different parts of the author's pysche. John Gardner reveled in all this chaos in his earlier novels. In Grendel, Beowulf is just another ridiculous hero in front of a bunch of snivelling fools when we get the classic epic from the monster's point of view. And in The Sunlight Dialogues, self-parody pops up in thoughts such as "She realized, briefly, that she was merely a character in an endless, meaningless novel, then forgot." Veracity...